What is OpenFlow? What does OFELIA? An Introduction to OpenFlow and what OFELIA has to do with it

What is OpenFlow? What does OFELIA? An Introduction to OpenFlow and what OFELIA has to do with it

The internet is a GREAT INVENTION! The Internet is great! But, ehem.. Houston, we have a problem 2012 2

Internet Technology somehow stuck Internet Protocol (IP) forms the basis of current communication networks the technology originates from the Sixties Workarounds have been applied so that it survived It works but we re stuck. No innovation (BTW, How long do we talk about introducing IPv6???) 2012 4

Current technology can t cope with business needs We still use old technology but we just pimp It To make it suitable for recent needs That s far from being optimal. Network innovation is impossible with closed/proprietary systems Need an open solution to implement new services with short time to market Operators do not want to wait for all their vendors to implement before being able to launch a new service Business changes rapidly, the network cannot even follow Network technology is not a driver for innovation any more Let s get back control over our networks! And here is where OpenFlow comes in 2012 6

What is OpenFlow? A child of Stanford's Future Internet research programme Separating control and user plane A centralized controller instance communicates with the network nodes using the standardized OpenFlow protocol Network applications reside on top of the controller Allows to program network behavior directly by the network operator Reducing time-to-market for specific solutions and Avoiding having to wait for all vendors to implement the desired functionality Currently being standardized at On the way into productive network 2012 7

OpenFlow: full control over flow routing Back to the roots: communication between endpoints create a flow New way of thinking in flows, not in packets / protocols The network operator re-gains full control of the network OpenFlow allows to control flow path routing end-to-end OpenFlow allows to implement services inside the network Controller (Intelligence) Application 1 Application 2 Application 1 Network as a Service (NaaS ) Firewall, Load Balancer Data Center Services Application 2 2012 9

How does it work? An OpenFlow switch only forwards frames if it has a flow entry In case it does not have one, it can ask somebody who knows Asks the controller for an according flow entry Packet Forwarding OpenFlow Switch Network Control OpenFlow Controller Rule Action Statistics Rule Action Statistics Flow Table Server Flow Setup modes: Proactive Controller pre-populates flow table entries. Reactive - If a switch receives a flow which is not shown in the flow table, the switch inquires of the controller about the flow. 2012 10

How does it work: an example Controller (Intelligence) 1. I wanna see this great video 4. Ups, new flow Where shall I send the video to? Start 3. streaming the video 2. Request streaming the video network with OpenFlow switches Content Store 2012 11

How does it work: an example Controller (Intelligence) 4. Ups, new flow Where shall I send the video to? Start 3. streaming the video 5. This way please network with OpenFlow switches 1. I wanna see this great video 2. Request streaming the video Content Store 2012 12

How does it work: an example Controller (Intelligence) 4. Ups, new flow Where shall I send the video to? Start streaming the video 6. 3. 5. This way please 6. The video stream flows the set-up way without bothering the controller any more network with OpenFlow switches 7. 1. I wanna I love this see this video great video!! 2. Request streaming the video Content Store 2012 13

Flow-based Matching & Actions Flow 1. Match (exact & wildcard) Action Statistics Flow N. Match (exact & wildcard) Action Statistics Example of Actions Flow Specification Port, VLAN ID, L2, L3, L4, Any type of network path possible, YOU program it! 1. Actions for Flow Unicast, multicast, modify header fields, drop, bandwidth control Unicast Multicast 2. 4. 3. Flow statistics Number of packets, number of bytes, connection time Multipath Load - balancing Redundancy Waypoints Middleware Intrusion detection 2012 14

And what has OFELIA to do with it? Provide a unique experimental facility based on OpenFlow Allows researchers to not only experiment on a test network Control the network itself precisely and dynamically Allows for Experimentation on multi-layer and multi-technology networks Program your own cloud network! Islands publicly available for experiments Eight Interconnected OpenFlow Islands Duration: 2010 2013 OFELIA Website: http://www.fp7-ofelia.eu/ 2012 15

The OFELIA Vision Users control their own network and can create an Internet of their own OFELIA provides the tools to create innovations for the future Internet OFELIA is enabling revolutionary Internet research in Europe OFELIA is creating a European substrate for this new way of thinking about options to create and run networks and services on top of them 2012 16

Create & Run your Experiment! 1 2 Have an idea! Log on to OFELIA! 3 Configure your network slice! 4 Run your experiment!!! Controller (Intelligence) Application 1 Application 2 Application 1 Network as a Service (NaaS ) Firewall, Load Balancer Data Center Services Application 2 2012 17

Example: Information-Centric Networking Example of exploitation of OFELIA to create innovations for the future Internet: Support for Information Centric Networking (ICN) ICN is a new networking paradigm in which the network layer provides users directly with contents, instead of providing communication channels between hosts, and is aware of such contents, and routes contents by name It is paradigm shift: circuit switching packet switching content switching Connect me with host 66.45.78.89 Give me today s issue of Time Magazine Current-Internet (Address-Centric Network) Information-Centric Network 2012 19

Example: Information-Centric Networking ICN and Flexibility of OFELIA Advantages of Information Centric Networking : It provides in-network caching and per-content quality of service differentiation It secures the content itself, instead of securing the communications channels It stops the Internet from crashing (BBC iplayer TV, Netflix ) OFELIA allows Deploying and testing an ICN system, which would otherwise require to deploy a new network (and this is per-se an experiment) Improving itself, so extending the experiments that can be run over its platform The CONVERGENCE project (www.ict-convergence.eu) will test its solutions in the ICN-augmented OFELIA and run trials handling four classes of content/scenarios: pictures, videos, podcasts, real world objects 2012 20

Some Links OpenFlow - Enabling Innovation in Your Network http://www.openflow.org/ Open Networking Foundation https://www.opennetworking.org/ OFELIA s OpenFlow Video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjnhh4u_d5u OFELIA Testbed http://www.fp7-ofelia.eu/ 2012 22